With the doctor and the manservant safely embarked the driver climbed up to his seat and guided the coach out into the lane that ran toward town. There was little other traffic to consider. At the edge of the estate, the great city started to encroach. They passed several new and opulent houses, and some plots where new buildings were being constructed along the same lines as those already there: stucco double-fronted villas with solid wooden front doors and four or five floors. Birds chirped in the plane trees, and the horses pulling the carriage grumbled at each other politely and swished their perfectly dressed tails.
The coach trundled through the developments of Chelsea and Belgravia, before turning down into Whitehall to start its journey along the great east-to-west riverside processional route of state: past the remnants of the great palace which had burned down half a century before and the government buildings which had sprung up around it; then up and around to the Strand, where the palaces of the great and good had congregated along the river for three hundred years. The road was wide and straight but as it approached the Temple Bar it became narrower and more uncertain of its direction, as if in anticipation of the more ancient city and its older intricate ways, up ahead on the other side of the Fleet.
The coach turned into Crane Court on the left-hand side of the road and came to a halt in front of a small crowd of well-dressed men. Some of them noticed the coach arriving, and there was a little ripple of applause in recognition of the doctor’s approach. The manservant got out first. The crowd stopped chattering and watched the black figure, dressed discreetly yet expensively, as he pulled out the steps from within the coach and, with one arm held out, supported his old master as he climbed down.
The doctor felt his knees almost buckle as he stepped down onto the ground, and for a moment the manservant took almost all his weight and prevented him tumbling to the ground. The old man leaned into the manservant for several seconds, the Negro’s arm strong and secure and unyielding beneath the doctor’s frail, almost absent grasp. Resolution, resolution! the doctor told himself. He closed his eyes for a moment and took several deep breaths, bringing his body back under his control, locking out his knees and leaning back toward his own center of gravity. After another handful of moments, they were on terra firma, and the old doctor, leaning on the young manservant’s arm, stood for a moment, and turned his eyes to the top of the building before him, wondering if the awful thing that was up there, the Monster in this place’s attic, was even now looking down on them. With that thought, the old doctor made his way for the last time into the residence of the Royal Society.
The Society was based in two houses acquired under the presidency of Isaac Newton thirty years before. The buildings were four stories tall and looked like older, more worldly wise versions of the houses now going up on the edges of the doctor’s estate. They had been adapted by Wren and now accommodated a library and a discussion chamber. A red light outside the building showed when the members of the Society were meeting to discuss the systems of the world, and it was shining this afternoon, even in the bright daylight. The windows of the buildings reflected back the gentle sun, welcoming in the famous doctor, Sir Hans Sloane, President of the Royal Society, for his final lecture to the Fellows.
The doctor made his way into the Society’s cramped discussion chamber, followed by the men who’d been smoking in the street. A great many more darkly dressed men were already inside, and as one they stood and applauded the doctor as he made his way toward the tiny stage to take his place behind the lectern. Some even whistled. Not very distinguished, the doctor thought to himself, secretly pleased with the reception. One needs to keep a sense of proportion. His breath was steady, but he had a headache and felt clammy and cold. But then, he always felt clammy and cold.
The steps up to the stage seemed to be miles away, and didn’t seem to be getting any closer, but with another mutter of resolution, resolution he reached the bottom of them, and with one final effort (and a gentle, discreet shove from his manservant), the doctor dragged himself onto the stage and reached the sanctuary of the lectern. He gripped the wooden edge as hard as he could, and turned to face his audience.
The men in the room were noisily taking their seats, removing their hats and arranging their wigs. The doctor held on hard to the lectern. He looked down before the stage and saw his Negro manservant gazing up at him, apparently unconcerned, his dark skin like an exclamation mark amid the grandeur of the Fellows. The Negro’s calm stare seemed to calm the doctor, as if it was providing encouragement.
So the Fellows of the Royal Society waited for the final lecture (or, perhaps it would be better to say, the final sermon) from their old president, and for a moment (for several moments, actually) he forgot that his body was eating itself, he forgot the incessant pain and the daily humiliations, he even forgot the monstrous thing that waited in the attic, and he remembered that for centuries to come this building and this Society would acknowledge that the president who followed the great Newton had gloried in the name Sloane.
He smiled at the crowd. He had a few things to say.
“My friends,” he said, his voice quieter than he would have wanted but unwavering and clear, for which he was grateful. “It is almost beyond my capacity for speech to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to stand here—within this blessed building, the cherished carapace for this noble Society—and to see the familiar faces of England’s finest creatures arrayed before me. In none of the salons of the King can such a collection of beautiful minds and fair understanding be encountered. Not since the days of glory in Athens has so much knowledge and understanding been collected in a single place. If this building were to crumble into the earth, and all of this genius were to disappear with it, what a fall that would be. It is an awesome thought.”
Some frowns at this. Perhaps the image was blasphemous; the Society’s philosophers falling like angels into Lucifer’s domain. Milton would certainly not have approved.
“This grandeur and this awesome possibility serve to remind me of how far we have come. When I first visited this Society I was recently returned from adventures in the Americas and the Caribbean. I was a young man with the most vivid memories of amazing sights and picaresque peoples. I believed that I had seen the very edge of the world on my travels. I had certainly seen things which no educated man had seen before.
“When I saw those things, they were all of the nature of mysteries to me. The flora and fauna of that great island of Jamaica, for instance, presented themselves as an exotic combination of the oddly familiar and the profoundly strange.”
The old doctor paused. Some of his delight had left him. His reference to Jamaica had done nothing but remind him of the terrible cargo he’d brought from that place, and as he had done every day for the last fifty years he faced a familiar despair: that everything he had worked for, everything this building represented, was made ridiculous by the thing he had hidden upstairs. This despair had flooded his mind so often that he had become practiced in first facing it, and then deliberately ignoring it. He had even learned a little mantra to help him through these moments: there is an exception needed to prove every rule. He turned back to his speech, determined to talk that despair back into its cave.
“During my travels, I wrote down what I saw, and I drew it, and where possible I brought back jottings and specimens. These I took to my esteemed fellow-members of the Royal Society—to you! You, who have been busy cataloguing this world of wonders ever since our crown was restored. Between us, we have documented and detailed and delineated a world of precise geometric solidity, a world in which arcana and superstition have been buried beneath an architecture of knowledge which celebrates reason over mystery and experiment over unquestioning faith.
“When I look at this great room, and these great and beautiful men within it, I can perceive the same process: one by which mankind grapples with and makes sense of the world, shaping it into forms which he can understand and control. We have done this, my friends.
We have shaped a world in our own image. Everything we see is explicable, every reality has a provable cause. Celebrate our wisdom, friends, and enjoy its rewards!”
A significant outbreak of applause at this.
“I am an old man, my fellow Fellows, and an old man becomes acutely aware of the operations of his own body. We old men are pursued by a dozen little daily humiliations. But this morning I awoke, and I started thinking of the operations of my own body, and I found a language for these considerations. The language of anatomy, the language of the great Morgagni himself.”
A cheer from one section of the crowd at this, and a middle-aged, dark-haired man is shoved to his feet by those around him, and for a moment Sloane feels tears even in his own dried-out eyes, because here is Morgagni himself, the great anatomist, who must have traveled all the way from Italy just to bid the old doctor farewell. The Italian bows to the stage, and Sloane, a huge lump in his throat (did Morgagni have a name for that?), bows back.
“My gratitude for the great Morgagni’s presence is boundless. You are welcome, sir, and may I take this opportunity to thank you for your efforts in the service of knowledge and of health.
“But to continue with my theme. This very morning, when I awoke, I felt I had no control over my own bodily processes. Age had taken the helm, and I was helpless in the face of mortality. My body was in the process of declining into decrepitude. But then I started a naming. I ran through a concordance of anatomy, picturing the words and their matching properties. I pictured a map of the body in which the anatomists have named the countries and cities. And, sure enough, as I did this, I regained control and I took back ownership of myself.
“This is my point, gentlemen. For in naming is power. By discovering, cataloguing, and naming a plant, a creature, a river, or a tree, we do more than grow our knowledge. We extend our dominion. As the Lord told Adam, mankind is in power over the beasts of the earth, and in naming those beasts we both reflect our power and we deepen it.
“I said earlier that I believed that in Jamaica I was at the edge of the world. But we know, of course, that this world has no edge. We also know that our maps have great areas of uncertainty. Indeed, some of them have more white in them than blue, green, or brown. There are worlds waiting to be discovered. And in naming those worlds, we will take ownership of them. Ownership in the name of this great new Britannia, of course, but also ownership in the name of mankind itself, whose dominions have been extended by the thrusting explorations of Britons, with so much yet to be discovered. I shall not be there to see these discoveries, but I know that they are there, shimmering over the edge of the world.
“And with that redemptive thought I leave you, my fellow wanderers.”
It was a long speech, and by the end of it his voice was hoarse, his heart was racing, and his headache had turned from a thud into a glass-like stabbing. And he was of course conscious of the great irony running through the speech like a watermark only he could see, the irony of the unname-able thing in the attic. Nonetheless he felt exhilarated as the crowd raised a cheer, and he managed to step back down to the ground almost without aid, apart from a final little lurch which the manservant anticipated and caught. That was Fear and not exhaustion, he thought. The Fear of what is to come.
He walked through the crowd, the one great task left to complete. Various Fellows slapped his back (he rather wished they wouldn’t, such were the vibrations these slaps set off throughout his ancient bones), and Morgagni was shoved at him to kiss him on both cheeks in the alarming Italian manner. And then he was out, and as quickly as it had arisen his exhilaration faded, leaving only the now familiar sense of dried-up exhaustion.
Immediately, a problem presented itself. Sloane needed to get to the top floor of the building, but his exertions had ended his capacity for climbing for the day, and possibly for all time. He looked up at the staircase and suddenly his little scheme seemed stupid and half-baked. How had he ever imagined he would get up to the top floor?
“Sir,” said the manservant, his hand respectfully on his master’s forearm. “If I may suggest.” He leaned forward, and indicated his shoulders.
Sloane paused at the prospect of this. On the one hand, the prospect of being dragged physically up the stairs by a Negro was not appealing, however well mannered and genteel the Negro. On the other hand, there was no other way of reaching the summit of the Society’s headquarters, and the alternative was a loose end which could not be countenanced. He really did need to speak to the thing that dwelt on the fourth floor.
When it came to it, there was little need for squeamish consideration. With a glance around to check that no one was watching, Sloane reluctantly acquiesced to being carried, and the impeccable little black manservant gently leaned the old man over his shoulder, his feet in front of him and his head behind, and began to climb the stairs. Sloane allowed himself to go as limp as possible, and barely glanced behind him as they climbed, pondering what he would say as the trunk of his manservant swayed from side to side. For himself, the manservant hardly noticed the weight of the old man; it was like carrying a great plucked battered old bird with hollow bones and smoke for lungs.
Eventually, they reached the top floor, via a narrowing series of little staircases which curled in and around each other as if architected by some imaginative child alone in a dusty nursery. At the top the manservant carefully placed Sloane back onto his feet. The doctor nodded his thanks, with a frown to suggest they would never speak of it again (and little thought for how he was going to get downstairs again). Reaching into his frock-coat’s pocket, the doctor pulled out an old key, placed it into the lock of the only door of the landing on which they stood, and went into the room beyond. He gestured to the manservant to remain outside.
The room was only dimly lit by a single window, despite the spring daylight outside. It contained a bed, a chair, a small table, a small set of shelves filled with books, and a tall young man with dark hair, who was reading and not, as Sloane had earlier imagined, gazing out into Crane Court. The man was chained at the ankle, and the chain was itself connected to another chain which ran through iron eyelets around the room. This other chain was thick, and the eyelets through which it ran were welded into thick metal squares which were bolted into the wall at intervals of eighteen inches. However, the chain which held the man’s ankle to the chain on the wall was finer, and the anklet from which it hung also had a refined elegance about it, as if it could be worn with comfort, unlike the clunking metalwork which currently held malefactors to the walls of Newgate. Both chains would have evoked different images in the head of the black manservant who waited patiently outside.
At the sight of Sloane, the young man stood up from his chair to allow the older man to sit down, and walked to the window. He was tall, and walked with a limp, which Sloane had diagnosed as a side-effect of the weight of the chain on one leg at all times, or perhaps of the blocking of healthy blood flow through the ankle to the foot on that side. With a sigh, Sloane sat down. Neither spoke for a moment; the tall young man crossed his arms and watched the doctor, while the doctor leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. For a moment, he looked like he was sleeping. Then his eyes opened, and he began to speak.
“First of all, my apologies,” he said, not looking at the young man but instead examining the fineness of the ironwork which bound the chain. Who worked on that? I cannot remember. My God, the work is exquisite.
The young man had still not spoken.
“I have not been able to visit for some time,” said Sloane. “My time as President is coming to its natural end, as indeed is my life. My days have been spent more on my properties to the west of the city. I have missed our conversations.”
Still nothing from the young man.
“This degradation of responsibility is of course made worse by the fact that there is news for you. And I must admit that the nature of the news has added to my reluctance to come here. The Fellows who know of your existence have reached a conc
lusion. Indeed, we did so at our last session, and the Fellows have agreed to accept my proposal.”
Now, Sloane did look at the young man. The man’s eyes were set steadily on him. As ever, Sloane found himself terrorized by the dead stillness he saw in them.
“The Fellows have spent many hours and days examining your case, William. The finest philosophical minds of modern times have disputed your existence and have carefully monitored you over the past decades. We have maintained copious records and drawings, and we have, where possible, sought to discover the knowledge of other cultures on the matter of your continued existence and the unassailable fact that you do not appear to age.”
The young man unfolded his arms and shifted his weight, and the chain screeched gently, like a dying crow.
“Fifty years,” continued Sloane. “Half a century of investigation and disputation, and we have reached no conclusion. And soon, I will die. The man who brought you from Jamaica. The man who exercised the full intellectual armory of the Royal Society to understand you. I will die any day now, William. And you will live.”
He sighed, as if with longing.
“I cannot deny,” he said, “that this voyage of discovery began with a hope that uncovering your secrets would uncover knowledge and arcana which might have proved useful to me, as I approach death’s horizon. I cannot deny that I envy you, now. This very evening my Negro manservant has had to carry me up the stairs to your room. Age and decrepitude have reduced me to this, William. To riding on a Negro’s back. And still, you remain young.”
“If the curse were transferable, Sloane, I would transfer it willingly.” Lord, that voice, that awful, cold, deep, well-spoken, dispassionate voice. The voice of a renegade God walking through an apocalypse.
“So you have said, repeatedly, and I have no cause to doubt it. But know this, William. Not ever having to feel age creep into your bones. Not having to feel the rocks on your chest when you wake in the morning, or the creaking of your joints as they painfully fold and unfold, or the dull, dry headache that is one’s companion for every waking moment; not having to feel these things would seem, if you were in my position, a prize worth any price.”
The English Monster Page 26